Thursday, 12 February 2009

Geert Wilders

I don't like the man. I don't think his film, Fitna, is of any real quality, or advances the West's advantages one iota. But I applaud both him and Lord Pearson and Baroness Cox for their brave and principled stand in continuing with a planned showing of the film on the Parliamentary estate.

John Stuart Mill wrote

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

To pretend that there is not a collision of values between the West and Islam is to be both stupid and purblind. I believe that our values are right, and theirs are wrong. And foremost amongst our values is freedom of speech, thought and assembly. There must be no retreat, not one step back, on this principle.

11 comments:

I watched his film. Lots of the most extreme Imams preaching death to the infidel and blown up bodies. It is alarming and a bit crap. But those imams are actually saying those things and bomb footage isn't made up. There are no moderate muslims in the film. But isn't it up to moderate muslims to decry the extremists?

Lilith, I totally agree. I think much of the prejudice against Muslims would abate if only the moderates would speak out. Their silence is deafening and many people will just look at them as one big organised hatred campaign.

If they don't make an effort to shut the extremists of their religion up, they only have themselves to blame for the prejudices they will suffer.

The reason we never hear anything from moderate Muslims (and I, ftr, am a non-native Urdu-speaker who grew up in a Muslim area in this country and attended a 90+% Pakistani Muslim school) is that most Muslims, even the really nice ones, have a lingering feeling that the extremists are right.

In most every other religion, moderates look askance at the behaviour of extremists (consider the hilarious "Pink Chaddi" protest against Hindu mentalists in India) and see their as lunatic. In Islam, alone amongst modern religions, moderates look at extremists and wish they had the testicular fortitude to be extremists too.

Most Muslims you meet in your daily life do not want to slaughter you or impose Sharia on your and have no interest in the establishment of a caliphate. But most Muslims feel like they should want these things. Contemporary British Islamic culture is so heavily informed by Wahabbi-funded extremism that anyone who doesn't want to be a jihadi is left to feel like they're not a real Muslim, that they're back-sliding. And God help any Muslim who decides that atheism or Christianity might have a point...

This is the reward we get for not defending the right of the BNP to be heard and opposed with argument.

Defend against whom ? The BNP and its fore runners, are its own worst enemy, its constant splitting with a new 'Leader' coming forward until a new putsch happens has just demonstrated it is not a democratic party